Glen Stancil

A fleet whisperer in the oil capital of America

In Houston, where the skyline was built on barrels of crude, Glen Stancil runs a company whose entire business case depends on the opposite of gasoline. Merge Electric Fleet Solutions exists to do one stubbornly hard thing: take a company's fleet of vans, trucks and cars and make every one of them run on electricity, without the operator losing sleep or money over it.

That is the pitch, and it is deceptively simple. A delivery company or a utility wants to go electric. The vehicles now exist. The investors and regulators are pushing. But between the decision and the first charged van sits a thicket of problems - utility interconnection, permitting across dozens of jurisdictions, charging hardware that may or may not talk to the software, financing that makes the math work. Merge sells its way through that thicket. Stancil describes the company's job plainly: give customers "the knowledge, products, and services they need to electrify vehicles with confidence."

He is, by training, an electrical engineer who learned the language of finance. The combination is the whole point. Fleet electrification is not really a technology problem anymore - the batteries and motors work. It is an operations and economics problem, a question of whether the numbers close and the chargers turn on when the trucks come home at night. Stancil has spent a decade living inside exactly that question.

What sets Stancil apart from the wave of executives who discovered electric vehicles around 2020 is that he was already there in 2010, when the category was a curiosity and the chargers were few. He did not pivot into the EV business; he helped invent the public version of it. That decade of accumulated experience - the permitting fights, the utility negotiations, the hardware that failed and the hardware that held - is the asset he carries into every Merge customer conversation. It is hard-won and almost impossible to replicate, and it is why a young company can credibly claim to make a genuinely difficult thing look easy.

Reading three waves at once

When Stancil launched Merge in 2021 with backing from Pickering Energy Partners, he did not frame it as an act of faith in a greener future. He framed it as timing. Three things, he argued, had finally lined up: fleet-capable electric vehicles you could actually buy, corporate ESG pressure that made executives care, and regulation that pushed in the same direction. Miss any one of those and the company is too early. Catch all three and you have a market.

It is a characteristically unsentimental read. Stancil does not sell the EV transition as a moral cause so much as an inevitability with good unit economics - a thing that will happen because it pays, and his company's value is in making it happen faster and with fewer mistakes. The green halo is real, but it is not the load-bearing argument.

Before Merge: the EVgo decade

Stancil's resume is, in a real sense, a short history of public EV charging in the United States. In 2010 - years before Tesla made electric driving aspirational and long before "range anxiety" entered the dinner-table vocabulary - he co-founded EVgo, then operating under NRG. He started as VP of Strategic Marketing and worked his way to Chief Operating Officer. Under that team, EVgo grew into one of the country's largest networks of DC fast chargers, with hundreds of stations spread across dozens of markets.

In 2017 he struck out to found eMotive Solutions, where he led design, deployment and support of charging systems for automakers and charging networks. Add the two chapters together and the scoreboard reads: more than 1,500 charging sites across 40 states, and roughly $300 million of EV infrastructure actually built and switched on. Not slideware - poured concrete and energized cabinets.

Before any of the charging work, Stancil moved through the rooms where energy strategy gets argued: McKinsey & Company on the advisory side, then NRG Energy and Reliant Energy on the operating side, handling customer portfolios and strategy. By the time he turned to vehicles, he already understood the grid that would have to feed them.

The team he chose to bring

When Merge launched, Stancil made a point of the people standing next to him. Malcolm McVay, a former EVgo business leader who founded a clean-transportation consultancy, came on as VP of Operations. David Eckels and Jason Buckland joined as co-founders leading products and business development. Stancil called it a privilege rather than a hire - "I am privileged to have Malcolm, David, and Jason joining MERGE as co-founders." Between them, the founding bench carried decades of charging-infrastructure scar tissue, the kind you only earn by deploying real hardware in 40 states and dealing with 40 different permitting regimes.

The credential stack

The engineering came first: a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin. The business fluency came later: an MBA from Stanford. It is an unusual pairing, and it shows up in how Stancil talks about Merge - equally comfortable discussing reverse-flow capability and an attractive bottom line in the same breath. On industry podcasts he has dug into the technical weeds of Plug & Charge and Autocharge, the protocols that let an EV authenticate and bill automatically the moment it plugs in, and what they mean for the "ideal charging experience." Few CEOs can hold that conversation. Fewer still can then explain the financing model behind it.

In December 2021, months after launch, Merge closed a Series A round, extending Pickering Energy Partners' bet on the energy transition. The funding gave the young company room to expand its fleet services and chase the convergence Stancil had been describing. It also confirmed the thesis he had wagered his career on: that the dull, hard, unglamorous work of plugging fleets into the grid was about to become very good business indeed.

Why fleets are the hard part

There is a reason Stancil aimed Merge at fleets specifically rather than at the consumer who plugs a sedan into a garage outlet. A fleet is a system. Twenty or two hundred vehicles come home to the same depot, all hungry for charge at the same hours, all drawing on the same utility connection that may not have been sized for it. Electrify a fleet badly and you do not get a slightly worse car - you get trucks that cannot run their morning routes. The stakes are operational, not cosmetic, and that is exactly the kind of problem an electrical engineer with an operator's instincts is built to solve.

Merge's answer is to handle the whole chain rather than sell a single box. Site design. Charging-hardware evaluation, so a customer is not stuck with cabinets that fight their software. Flexible, modular deployment that can scale as the fleet grows rather than forcing an all-at-once gamble. Performance reporting and data analysis once the chargers are live, because a fleet manager who cannot see uptime and energy cost is flying blind. The unifying idea is to absorb the complexity so the customer does not have to become an energy company to run delivery vans.

The Houston paradox

There is a quiet irony in where Merge plants its flag. Houston is the energy capital of the country, a city whose wealth and skyline rose on oil and gas. Stancil's company sits inside that ecosystem - backed by Pickering Energy Partners, a Houston energy financial-services firm - and points it at the electric future. That is not a contradiction so much as a recognition. The people who know how to finance, permit and build energy infrastructure at scale already live in Houston. Merge borrows that muscle and aims it at charging cabinets instead of wellheads. The capital and the expertise that built the carbon economy turn out to be exactly what the post-carbon one needs.

It also explains the partnership's logic. Pickering Energy Partners did not back a science project; it backed an operator with a decade of deployments and a clear-eyed business case. When the firm framed the Series A as continuing its "leadership in energy transition," it was describing a strategy, not a slogan. Stancil's job is to turn that thesis into energized chargers and electrified fleets, one depot at a time.

The long game

Ask what Stancil is ultimately after and the answer is unglamorous in the best way: he wants fleet electrification to be simple, affordable and scalable - boring, even - so that switching a fleet to electric becomes a routine business decision rather than a leap of faith. That is the quiet ambition of someone who has spent ten years watching the EV story lurch from novelty to inevitability. He is not trying to win an argument about climate. He is trying to make the better economics easy enough that the argument never needs to be had.